Sunday, May 27, 2007

Hands up!

I'm years behind on my knitting gallery, so I decided to start this blog. The first few posts will be catching up on my knit creations over the past few years. The theme for today is gauntlets and long gloves.

I had to go to a boring party last fall. On the way to the party, I stopped at the yarn store to get something to keep me amused during the party. I picked up some Limbo Mexico in the bright Sunset colorway thinking that it would cheer me up. By the time I got to the party, I'd decided to make myself some long gloves to keep in the car, something to wake me up on those cold drives into work.

The yarn worked like a charm. I started at the elbow and knit industriously, enchanted at each color change. I smiled beatifically at people who might otherwise have bored me, and knit on in perfect serenity.

One of my accomplishments on these gloves was making the two gloves match one another. This took some doing, as the different balls of yarn went in different directions. I had to be especially creative to get the fingers to match, as I needed sections of colors that weren't at either end of any ball and so had to be extracted from the middle.

These gloves go with everything. Initially, I wore them only in the car, but they were so cozy and so cheerful that I started to wear them into work, to the store, and even to Quaker Meeting. They are much admired, proof positive that it's not so much what you knit as what yarn you use.

The yarn store snapped my picture wearing these gloves the next time I dropped by. I was tacked to the shelf below the Limbo Mexico until the summer yarn collections rolled into town.

This is the first pair of gauntlets I ever knit. These were a present for our piano teacher, a lovely lady who lives in a freezing cold house. She has confessed to wearing them to do all her household chores during the cold months, including cooking and washing dishes.

These are probably my favorite of the four pairs of gauntlets I made in the fall of 2005. A forest green Zephyr wool/silk blend with a dignified cable down the back. Elegant, sober, and sensible.

I'll have to photograph the other two pairs of gauntlets, the gloves from the previous year's round of knitting, and the dragon mittens I made for my youngest child.